Multicomponent MR image denoising

Magnetic Resonance images are normally corrupted by random noise from the measurement process complicating the automatic feature extraction and analysis of clinical data. It is because of this reason that denoising methods have been traditionally applied to improve MR image quality. Many of these methods use the information of a single image without taking into consideration the intrinsic multicomponent nature of MR images. In this paper we propose a new filter to reduce random noise in multicomponent MR images by spatially averaging similar pixels using information from all available image components to perform the denoising process. The proposed algorithm also uses a local Principal Component Analysis decomposition as a postprocessing step to remove more noise by using information not only in the spatial domain but also in the intercomponent domain dealing in a higher noise reduction without significantly affecting the original image resolution. The proposed method has been compared with similar state-of-art methods over synthetic and real clinical multicomponent MR images showing an improved performance in all cases analyzed. © 2009 Jośe V. Manj́on et al.